Originally Posted by Jenson71
Tonight I watched a movie called Blade Runner. Not sure if anyone's heard of it, but you might want to check it out.
So Blade Runner is about humanity and life and death. Already it deserves attention. The replicants, we are told, are less than human: they don't have empathy. At least that's what the corporate designer wants us to think. He is god, he is the decider.
But he's wrong. The replicants do have human emotions. They love, they want, and they cherish life. This desire, becoming a demand, for more leads a rebel replicant to violence and murder. He is played like a psychotic madman, but at the end, you feel bad for him. You empathize with him. I don't want to die so soon either, Roy. Especially neither do people with cancer or other terminal diseases. Wouldn't 150 years be nice?
Treating the replicants as slaves is as morally wrong as treating black people as slaves. So we say they are less than human, but why? Because they are made from humans? Are not other humans made from humans? Because they have no soul? From a Christian perspective, this is intriguing. We can consider this, though perhaps theologians and philosophers would help us greatly here. Oh well, we will give it our best. It is not the material that determines a spiritual soul made in the image of God and connected to Him. It is not the millions of atoms that compose our bodies. There are perhaps other life forms other than human that God granted spiritual souls on other planets in other solar systems in other galaxies in other clusters in other superclusters. As human beings, that we have a spiritual soul given by God to us is a belief from revelation. We don't know about what else, but we must consider that God is not limited to 'souling' us homosapiens alone.
My point is this: if we come into contact with other creatures, even those we make and consider artificial, and they exhibit displays of human like self-awareness and emotion, we must give it the benefit of the doubt that we are encountering a precious life we similar human dignity and that it would be wrong to deny them this. If our AI robot starts saying "I deserve better than this!" I think we need to listen up.
Blade Runner tackles this. And it does so in a fantastic way. Its vision is remarkable. The music, which offers us this calm amidst the storm, reminds me of Taxi Driver's. It allows the audience to breathe and sort this information out.
And Harrison Ford is just great in this. I couldn't believe it. He transcends his "action star" persona by miles.
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